What a field day for the heatA thousand people in the streetSinging songs and carrying signsMostly saying, "hooray for our side"

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Linkee-poo to dungeons deep and caverns old

Jim Hines clarifies the point behind his pose off. Having worked in advertising and design and partially in their distant cousin, fashion, for over 20 years now, what Jim is exposing is only the tip of the iceberg. Fr'instance, Cosmopolitan is a flagship publication for feminism. You've seen the contents, I would hope. Both the ads and the "visual" articles? While some of that can be chalked up to "spiked-heel" feminism, some of it also ties into the self-loathing complexes that feminism was partially about (ie. to stop that cultural shit).

I should have mailed it to the Marx Brothers! A replica of Dr. Henry Jones' Grail Diary is sent to the University of Chicago. Sometime people with way too much time on their hands do silly things, like Dr. Moreau experiments on Peeps. However, this waste of time I approve of. Making the universe special one package at a time. (Grokked from Chia Lynn)

They don't make 'em like they used to. Irene Gallo on how you paint a 150 foot tall "The Hobbit" movie poster. Out where I live I see the faded remnants of the time when barns were painted to be rural billboards. Doing art this way is sadly going away. Although happily for my friends who work in large format.

Wait, there's a Lone Ranger movie? And Johnny Depp is Tanto? I hate to say it, but the trailer looks like it's a lot of cgi "ooo, don't this look special" stuff, which would be too bad. And, if you listen closely, you can hear the protests already. I like Johnny Depp, but I'm not sure about this one. Also, a little questioning of the physics of that last sequence in the trailer would have gone a long way.

The world's first and only honest resume of a graphic designer. Bwahahahaha. "Skills: All the computer programs known to man, except for Microsoft Word. That is where graphic design goes to lay down and die." Hahahahahahaha. Oh my yes, this. (Pointed to by Dan)

All colors are in essence, black. Or all movies are the same, and they're all becoming spaghetti westerns with excellent CGI. Why, because this is the true Hollywood Formula, "Oh, that worked and made us a butt-load of money? More of that, please."

There are huge numbers of (admittedly geeks) who think the Singularity is going to be wonderful. If you don't know, the Singularity has morphed from the moment that technological change occurs so fast, nobody can keep up with it, then it was faster than we could realize (think entire industrial revolution occurring in an afternoon), and finally is now recognized as that moment were we can upload our brains into computers. Personally, I think that's a horrible future and would never consider it unless I was 104 and we were sending a ship to a nearby star and that was the only way to go. One of the many reasons boils down to essentially this. I love programmers. Hell, I was on that course myself. But the vast majority of programmers couldn't get out of a wet paper bag (let alone program their way out) with a map, a light, and a knife. Seriously, if the NYTs, The Paper of one of the US's most integrated and diverse cities, can't get their subscription page right, what makes you think I would trust them with my memories? "Oops, sorry, buffer overload."

Eric deconstructs the latest mind fart of Justice Antonin Scalia. Sometime I wonder just what happened to him since at one point he had to have the intellectual chops to graduate from law school. And at one time he was considered one of the most principled and intellectual of the justices. But for a while he's been going down hill, which most people finally recognized by his intellectual u-turn in dissenting over the Obamacare case (which was argued to the positive specifically along the lines of his previous rulings, at one point it was thought that he might actually be the 5th vote to uphold the law simply because to not do so would involve a theoretical pretzel knot that seemed unsurmountable - but then he just threw out his previous forty years of judicial decisions and philosophy to find against).

Just in case you run into someone who likes to talk about "what the Bible forbids", here's 76 other things banned by the Bible. Conservatives like to forget about "66. Mistreating foreigners – 'the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born' ((Leviticus) 19:33-34)" Waiting to see if the conservatives who love to talk about "teh gayz 'cause Bible" realize that they also then need to remove restrictions of immigration. 'Cause if they argue Paul's vision in Acts of God spreading the banquet before him nullifies the prohibitions against foods, but not acts, well, yeah, that whole "love thy neighbor" admonition is also an act, not a food. (Pointed to by Dan)

Not sure if this is of interest to anyone else, but the Navy is testing the UCAS aboard the USS Truman. That's the Navy's fighter drone program getting ready for all carrier operations. If you watch the video on that page, apparently the UCAS comes complete with a Kinetics.

"'It's what lawyers call betrayal without remedy'." The fuck the worker campaign continues rolling along. This time Hostess executives took pension money from the employees (and in case you didn't know, the Baker's Union is very, very, big on pensions) and plowed it into operating expenses instead of depositing it in the pension plan. And I disagree with the lawyers, while you may not be able to sue under pension laws (and ain't that grand, you all do know about the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation), if the deal was structured as a $0.30 raise, $0.28 diverted to the pension fund, I would still try to sue under wage theft. Say, you know how the state and local governments talk about their pension liabilities? You know this is how they got those unpaid liabilities, right? They didn't contribute the proper amount to the pension funds for decades and now the bill is coming due. But we're going to screw those employees over as well. (Grokked from Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

But then, we are always afraid of outsourcing. And damn the costs, don't we all want our WalMart "falling prices"? Not only is worker compensation and safety compromised, the side argument to this is environmental destruction. You outsource jobs because of that as well. (Grokked from Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Who won the space race? That's an article about how Kazakhstan wants Russia to reopen negotiations on the use of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Russia's main launch facility. But out of 17 planned launches by NASA next year, by my count 9 of them are from Baikonur. So again I ask, who won? (Pointed to by John)

About Me

I am a writer of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction. Here you can find some of my thoughts about writing, politics, society, dreams, and anything that comes into my head. Sometimes I drop a Story Bone or two. And then there is the tweeting.

The opinions expressed on this blog are my own and should not be considered the opinions of my employers or clients.

Da Rules

Anything put in a post with the title "Story Bone" is up for grabs. If it sets off a story bomb in your head, go for it. I don't claim any right except to maybe write my own story based on the bone. I haven't researched the bones to make sure I'm not trodding on somebody else's toes so use at your own risk. Think of these as free ideas.

Freed Scribblings

The Company of Ravens - First Chapter This is the story that nearly killed me and forced me to start writing down these things in my head. It's still a draft. After innumeral edits this is still at the point I realized I needed more skills to tell the story, and also the point where I realized I could do this.

The Dead Are Busy Released from the trunk in celebration of the first International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, April 23, 2007.

Storming Heaven This was the first short story I wrote that I felt was ready for publication. Released from the trunk in celebration of the second International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, April 23, 2008.